BFRND: “I played Demna the guitar and we never left each other”

Ditching viral moments for couturier craft, Balenciaga is back and better than ever, primed with a new (well, classic, actually) vision and a soundtrack to match. Responsible for the latter, the house’s composer, BFRND or Loïk Gomez mined his personal archive for a fitting sound to see in the next chapter. Riffing on the theme of love, BFRND settled on a melody he played for his husband Demna when they first met.

Fine-tuning the piece for AW23, BFRND plays an integral role in framing Balenciaga’s promised return to heritage, a move based on three key pillars: tailoring, silhouette and elegance. Forget gimp masks and Jon Rafman-produced digital dystopias, this season is about revitalising Cristóbal Balenciaga’s hallowed codes.

Granted, it’s a tall order, but if BFRND’s back catalogue is anything to go by, he’s more than capable of creating a fitting soundscape. While he’s best known for his blistering onslaughts of kickdrums, wailing sirens and Fortnite jingles, he’s no less adept in delivering tear-jerker orchestral arrangements, such as the Love in E Minor score for Balenciaga’s AW22 couture collection.

He’s a man with range. Not only has BFRND crossed genres, but he’s also been pivotal in the rise of Demna’s Balenciaga, working in close unison with his partner to ensure the sounds tie up the clothes, set design and accompanying visuals. All the while, he’s posterboy-ed for the brand’s eerie take on late-capitalist aesthetics, blessing campaigns and runways with his steely gaze. Together with Demna, he shares a creative history — as well as two dogs and a countryside home near Geneva. It seems fitting, then, that BFRND joins Demna for his next fashion milestone.

Before the show, we caught up with BFRND to hear how he developed the soundtrack, his and Demna’s meet-cute and other projects in the pipeline.

**The soundtrack for AW23 is a message of love, featuring a melody you composed 20 years ago. Why have you brought it back for AW23?
**For Demna and me, this show goes back to the essence of our love for what we do. For Demna, it’s doing the fashion, being a dressmaker, cutting patterns. He loves to deconstruct existing pieces to create other ones, but he also loves to do that himself at home as a craft. For me, it’s the same, but with music. My first love with music came when I was approximately 11 years old, and I got my first guitar. I’m someone that doesn’t like to learn with lessons but feeling instruments. I would rehearse every day, trying to play what was in my head until it sounded good. That’s more or less how I learned music.

**The melody you’ve used is one you played to Demna when you first met. Can you tell us about that?
**We met in London after first meeting online. In his hotel room, there was a guitar (probably as decoration), and I picked it up. I didn’t even have a guitar pick to play it; I took the corner of a cigarette pack to make one. And I played the first melody I had ever created because it’s my favourite melody to play on guitar. For this show, we wanted a positive message and feeling, and love was the best one for it. We share a lot of love, and we put a lot of love [into] the show to make it the best it can be. We didn’t want the music to be dark either.

H**ow did you guys first come to meet?
**We met on Facebook actually – Demna messaged me. I really didn’t know who he was at the time. We started chatting and calling for hours and hours, and a week later, we met in London because I was moving there. That’s when I played the guitar, blah, blah, blah, and then, we never left each other. Like a romantic comedy moment!

**In some of the collections, like the blizzard-scaped AW22 show, your soundtracks have been harder, electronic and often quite dark. As Balenciaga enters a new era, how will your musical direction change?
**It’s going back to the essence of who you really are and what really drives you. In my case, it’s a full circle [moment] to explore where I come from. From the beginning, the goal with Demna was always to do something different and stronger every season and explore different areas. Since Balenciaga is now undergoing a shift, I had a mission not to do anything we have done before. So, I could not do electronic, I could not do hyper-dramatic and sinister vibes. For me, acoustic guitar is so warm and beautiful that it was the right choice to pair with the show. And the melody of the piano [in the soundtrack] is different to electronic ­– it’s not so aggressive. It’s different kinds of melodies and feelings.

**The show will focus on craft and silhouette, and the set design will be quite minimal. How have you responded to the collection?
**For me, it’s both set design and the collection that impacts the music. Because the set design is very minimal, it’s light-coloured, that impacts the sound. I have this – apparently, it’s a neurological condition – called synaesthesia, meaning that I can hear colour. Even a garment, I can look at it and feel how it sounds. And that impacts me. So, I taped the show line-up with all the looks on my desk, and every time I was composing, I would look at it to get that the attitude of the garments and the models. I’d imagine them walking in time with the music, which helps with rhythm because the construction of a soundtrack is not like making a song to sing.

Here, it’s already very long – the show is about 10 minutes – and you have to tell a story all the way along. On a song, you would cut much faster; here, you try to have longer melodies. You have models coming, you have stuff to look at, and you’re not necessarily concentrated all the time, so you need to grab their mind with different mood shifts. Of course, with the construction of garments, there are pieces that are so specific, so I change music throughout the soundtrack because there are shifts in the collection.

Did Demna give you any pointers to develop the soundtrack this season?Yeah, it was totally Demna’s initiative to bring back this melody. He was like, “I want to use the guitar thing”. For me, I know this song by heart, so it’s a kind of say-no-more situation. Making this soundtrack was [about] trusting the gut feeling you’ve had for 20 years and making what you like. If you started with this melody, and still use it now, it’s probably for a reason. It’s kind of fate.

**You’ve talked before about taking genres people don’t associate with you – say, hip-hop or even orchestral music – and then twisting them. Was that the case with this soundtrack?
**I think so because when I sent the stems of my soundtrack to the guy that usually mixes my sounds was surprised. He told me by email, “Oh, I didn’t expect this mood.” I have this label of being the boom-boom, techno guy and everybody is used to the hyper-dramatic sounds and hardcore beats. I like to switch it because there are many parts of me that people don’t know, and this is one of them. I have much more. I’m not really someone that likes to be in one box because I get bored easily. Fashion taught me that: every show has to be unique. So, it also becomes a pattern in my music.

**Was there any back and forth between you and Demna on this soundtrack?
**It’s step-by-step. It depends. This one was really smooth. Everything I was showing him, he loved. He was very touched by it because he feels that it’s my best soundtrack ever, and it expresses so many of his feelings. That’s probably the best compliment he could make, telling me that it expresses what he wants to express so much that it makes him cry.

**Are you working on any other projects outside of Balenciaga?
**I’m working on an album. 100 percent of the tracks will be sung by me in French because it’s my native language. Until now, I was trying to sing in English, but I was born in France. Translating songs back into English meant that songs lost their meaning because I use words that are so specific to French, they don’t exist in English. It also changes my voice completely [when singing in French] because I’m much more confident, I believe in it. There is no trying to be what I’m not. I think around mid-March, the first single will come out. Yeah, that’s the news for now.